Friday, May 14, 2010

I picked up the Pasadena Star News this morning, and saw this headline.

When I turned to the opinion page, I found another headline:

"The culture of PUSD must change"

The opinion piece is a Guest View by Ross Selvidge who emerged as the leader of the No on CC campaign. First let me state that, while I supported Measure CC, I do not claim there are no valid arguments against it.

That being said, I read through his piece, and just shook my head through the entire thing. It's a smug, gloating indictment of PUSD based on the same cherry-picked data and tired old tropes use during the campaign. No surprise, to be sure, but it's frustrating that the only people who seem to get local media attention with regard to PUSD are the ones who can boil the complex issues down to meaningless soundbites. The local papers have been accused of everything from laziness to outright bias on PUSD issues. It seems that they often pick up the phone to get easy quotes from the same old nattering nabobs of negativism who make a sport of sitting on the sidelines and taking pot shots. So I appreciate the factual tone of headline and the story on the front page today, and it was a disappointment to see such an uninformed and negative opinion piece in the same issue.